Trump’s Christian Soldiers

This is an extremely dangerous moment in American and world history, more dangerous than even the Civil War. If the South had seceded, it would have destroyed the Union. If Donald Trump becomes President of the United States, it could destroy humankind.

The soul of the nation for the foreseeable future is at stake. It doesn’t have anything to do with picking the lesser of two evils with the institutionalized corruption of Hill-Bill. There simply is no precedent in American history for what Donald Trump represents.

I rarely get hate mail, but when I do, it comes from the worst haters of all in America—Christian fundamentalists. I obviously came too close to home in my last piece about the Trump phenomenon, despite or because I was speaking of liberal denial. It brought out the worst in the hypocritical, ‘love your fellow neighbor’ Christian crowd.

Here are a couple of examples of the vile, vicious hate mails from the dark core of the evangelical Christian Trump for President mob. One woman wrote, “You are a democrat in hiding and democrats are evil and filthy and pedophiles and sick who love murdering unborn babies!”

Another email read, “You have no clue that Donald Trump beating every odd is the Lord, and instead insult all people everywhere who trust God to see them through everything and put in place His hand-chosen people.”

That doesn’t represent the pathological extreme of Trump supporters; it reflects their general attitude. As the Donald himself has said, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

These Taliban-like emails (believe it or not the ad hominems get worse) give psychological projection a whole new meaning, both in terms of raw hate and in terms false hope.

I’m reminded of a column I wrote a few months after the malevolent invasion of Iraq in 2003, “They Work For the Devil and Call Him Jesus.”. If evil isn’t confronted and dispelled, it metastasizes and kills the human spirit.

Many people say they’re perplexed how Christians can idolize an utterly amoral, self-promoting, women-and-people-of color-demeaning, disabled-ridiculing, filthy-mouthed man who lusts after his own daughter (“If Ivanka wasn’t my daughter, I’d be dating her”).

But it’s not difficult to understand when one realizes that Donald Trump does not contradict what fundamentalist, evangelical Christianity has come to be in America; he is the logical end of it.

If ever there was a case where the followers gave rise to the leader, it’s with Donald Trump. But the roots lie deeper than this. As skewed toward money and power as American democracy is, ours is the most finely tuned market in the world, reflecting the real-time whims of the consumer with great precision.

Therefore as much as money, power and propaganda dominate the political sphere, and skew the election in deeply unfair ways, no populace in human history gets the politicians they deserve more than Americans.

It’s absurdly false to insist, as analysts and columnists repeat ad nauseum in one form or another, that ‘most Americans are far more generous than the politicians leading many of our states.’

Donald Trump doesn’t just embody a sizable segment of American voters. He reflects the unaddressed darkness at the core of the American body politic.

The variation between red states and blue states masks an underlying homogeneity. America has become a spiritual and social hellhole, which cosseted commentators are unable and unwilling to see from the their comfortable perches.

It’s easy to promote facile explanations of income inequality and the dislocations of globalization, even easier to speak of Trump as being ‘the last hate-filled stand of the white man.’

Though global issues and trends are part of the Trump phenomenon, linking the titillation of Trump with the farrago of Farage (the leader of the successful Brexit movement in England, who the Trump campaign imported last week to Mississippi of all places) doesn’t cut it. It’s simply too easy to say these men ‘are self-centered and cynical, manipulating resentment with half-truths and untruths, accommodating the loony extremist right.’

The malignancy that Trump and Farage personify has metastasized in America and Britain because there was no reckoning after the hellishness that Bush and Blair unleashed with the dogs of war after 9.11.

President Obama refused to stand up for the essential reckoning, so the Bush-Blair axis of evil has given rise to something even worse.

Can America begin to have a moral reckoning, a genuine soul searching, before the election? It’s not just Republicans who are overdue for one; it’s the people and the nation as a whole.

I fear that if we don’t go deeper than both conservative and liberal commentators are venturing, Trump will be elected. And even if he isn’t, all hell could still break lose.

There is still time for genuine soul searching in this land, but not much.